When Microsoft started giving away Internet Explorer, it became a serious challenger for Netscape. This program looked at the battle to become the dominant internet browser platform. Featured are Netscape Communicator 4.0, Internet Explorer 4.0, VRML 2.0 and RealSystem 5.0. Guests include Mark Brown, author of Using Netscape Communicator, and Amy Helen Johnson, Senior Technology Editor for Windows Magazine. Originally broadcast in 1997.


This movie is part of the collection: Computer Chronicles

Audio/Visual: sound, color
Keywords: Episode Year: 1997; Television Programs; Computers: History; netscape; internet explorer; browser

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Reviewer: Newtown! - - December 15, 2008
Subject: What a great vid.
I was only a year old when this was first broadcast, but it's quite awesome to see how it was about 11 years ago. Back when Safari didn't exist and most waited for that "beep beep wrrrr....." on their dial-up(!) modem before going on the web.

:D

Reviewer: cpt_mocha - - September 7, 2004
Subject: My company is still using Netscrape 4.7!!
These recent uploads of episodes from the early to mid-90's demonstrate the real dark ages of modern home and business computing. It was a period when the industry basically took a 20 year step backwards in terms of innovation and usefullness. Everything was in a flux period. Microsoft had just released Windows 95 which was a real piece of unstable garbage now that we look back at it, and in itself wasted countless MILLIONS of man-hours in downtime. Everyone was still futzing with DOS 6.2 and PC-DOS 7 and all of the various "memory managers" and other time wasters just to get the computer running stable for a few hours.. The 486DX 33 MHz was about the mainstream and software was starting to get bloated and difficult to run on even the faster 50-100 MHz machines, all thanks to Win 95 of course... Getting on the Internet was another thing. If you weren't an AOL'er you were probably dilly-dallying with SLIP or PPP scripts on Win 3.11 or trying to at minimum get a dial tone on Win 95 only to find your modem or drivers didn't support a UART compatible chipset, etc etc etc.

Anyway, this was also the time that Netscape started to get popular along with its "Communicator" suite of news and mail browsers. My company still uses this old unstable dinosaur called Netscape 4.7, it's a real shame considering what is available now. I remember seeing Netscape 2 or 3 for sale in places like CompUSA at the time! "That's so weird" I used to think, you can just download it for free!

All I have to say is thank God for the open source movement, nForce chipsets, the Athlon, the PC modder enthusiasts, Mozilla, Linux, and Win 2k! Goodbye dark days of the 90's, I'll take my Apple II or Macs back anytime if I had to do it over!